Robotics Challenge offers $2 million prize

Competition set for June: DARPA sees increasing need for robots

Published 9:31 pm, Friday, May 3, 2013

In the days after the Fukushima nuclear disaster in 2011, the Japanese government sent robots into contaminated reactors and turbines to survey damage, measure radiation and move hazardous debris.

Robots also sifted through rubble after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, and disarmed or detonated explosives in Afghanistan.

But the promise of such machines to aid in the prevention or aftermath of disasters is still rudimentary. They're limited in the ability needed to navigate terrain cluttered with wreckage, manipulate an unpredictable array of objects and maintain remote connections in extreme conditions, among many other challenges.

Last year, the Department of Defense agency announced a $2 million prize for the team that wins its upcoming DARPA Robotics Challenge, by steering virtual and real robots through mock disaster-recovery scenarios. The process took a step forward last week, and one local organization is playing an instrumental role.

That phase, called the Virtual Robotics Challenge, is set for June 17-28. Teams will have to use software to control simulated robots through scenarios like using water to cool spent fuel rods in a nuclear power plant. Groups like the Nuclear Regulatory Commission and first responders helped design the mock disasters.

The Open Source Robotics Foundation designed the virtual environment for the competition, built on its Gazebo three-dimensional robot simulator system, which can also be used to test robotic software before plugging it into actual hardware.

The top winners of the virtual round will be handed an actual robot developed by Boston Dynamics, a "humanoid" variety that walks on two legs, to use in subsequent rounds in December 2013 and 2014.

Top prize money

There are a variety of tracks in the competition, broken down by teams that are and aren't funded by DARPA, and those that will and won't build their own hardware as well as software. But in the end, only one team will claim that $2 million prize -- whichever one does the most to advance robots' ability to take over in situations too dangerous for humans.

"What we need to do now is move beyond the state of the art," said Gill Pratt, DARPA program manager, in a statement. "This challenge is going to test ... mobility, dexterity, strength and endurance in an environment designed for human use but degraded due to a disaster."

The Open Source Robotics Foundation was spun out of Menlo Park robotics research lab Willow Garage last April. That company develops personal robotics, notably the PR2, that can serve beer, bake cookies and fold laundry, among many other tasks.

It gave away the software, as well as quite a bit of the hardware, in the hope of creating common robotics standards that could free up researchers to focus on building interesting applications atop it. The basic idea was to replicate the success of free and open operating systems like Linux, which with a related stack of software undergirds much of the Internet.

"We get further faster by pooling our resources and improving the capabilities of an open, shared platform that gives everyone a better starting point," said Brian Gerkey, chief executive of the foundation.

DARPA funding

But adoption was slowed in part because the (not so cleverly named) Robot Operating System was being managed by the for-profit Willow Garage, which raised competitive concerns among potential users. The company had talked for months about spinning the operation into a separate nonprofit, but finally took the leap after DARPA approached it about using Gazebo for the virtual challenge.

There are complaints about ROS, specifically that it's slow and convoluted, said Frank Tobe, publisher of the Robot Report in Santa Barbara. And plenty of companies are sticking with their proprietary software.

But ROS is rapidly spreading throughout the robotic world, Tobe said.

Most of the major institutions for robotics, such as MIT, Stanford and SRI International, are using ROS. A number of commercial robotics companies have adopted it for certain products, including Rethink Robotics, Clearpath Robotics and Toyota. And plenty of the robots in the later stages of the DARPA competition will use ROS.

"It is comprehensive and capable and offers everything the proprietary systems do not: ease of use, simulation (and) adoption of all the latest sensors, vision and mobility systems," Tobe said.